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Michael Powell Quotes
1905–1990 England
Michael Latham Powell (30 September 1905 – 19 February 1990) was an English film director. Via his partnership with Emeric Pressburger and their production company "The Archers", the two men wrote, produced and directed a series of British films, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), A Matter of Life and Death (US: Stairway to Heaven 1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).
England Businesspeople Film directors Film producers Screenwriters Also known as: Michael Latham Powell
Random Michael Powell quote
15 quotes
I got my first assignment as a director in 1927. I was slim, arrogant, intelligent, foolish, shy, cocksure, dreamy and irritating. Today, I'm no longer slim.
Michael Powell (1987)
[of his wife Frankie] In fact, if only I had been the perfect husband, she would have been the perfect wife.
"We decided to go ahead with David O. (Selznick) the way hedgehogs make love: verrry carefully !"
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"Actors and technicians were being demobbed every day. Very soon the only ham actor left in the combined forces would be General George Patton."
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"Everyone has heard of Canterbury if only because they murder archbishops there."
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"Of course, all films are surrealist. They are because they are making something that looks like a real world but isn't."
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"Art is merciless observation, sympathy, imagination, and a sense of detachment that is almost cruelty."
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"I am the teller of the tale, not the creator of the story."
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"[After Peeping Tom] When they got me on my own [the critics] gleefully sawed off the limb and jumped up and down on the corpse."
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"My master in film, Buñuel, was a far greater storyteller than I. It was just that in my films miracles occur on the screen."
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"The truth lies in black and white."
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"For ten years we had all been told to go out and die for freedom and democracy; but now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art."
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"Seventy years ago there were men like D.W. Griffith and seventy years later - now - there are not many men like Martin Scorsese. But so long as there is one there will be others, and the art of the cinema will survive."
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"The great innovators have always been fearless.... I have fallen off haystacks, out of trees, over cliffs. I have been nearly drowned, shot and hanged. I have been in countless car crashes without getting a scratch. I have been alone in an office with Louis B. Mayer."
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[Cinematographer] Jack Cardiff once asked Powell "Michael, do you make films for all types of audiences, or just for yourself?" Michael shook his head vigorously. "I make films for myself. What I express I hope most people will understand. For the rest, well, that's their problem."
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